North Korea should take note of this story:
One of the big selling points of the Navy’s new destroyer is that it can rain a whole lot of hell — 20 rocket-propelled artillery shells, in less than a minute — on targets up to 63 nautical miles away. Fully armed, two DDG1000s should have the firepower of an entire, 640-man artillery battalion, the Navy promises.
But really, that’s the start. The ship’s real power will come when it moves away from chemical powders to shoot its projectiles — and starts relying on electromagnetic fields to shoot projectiles almost six kilometers/second, instead. With an electromagnetic rail gun pushing the rounds out so quickly, the number of rounds fired per ship would jump from 232 to 5000, Navy planners believe. (Military.com has a great primer on how it works.) Because they travel so fast — nearly Mach 7 — the destructive force those rounds deliver would more than double, from 6.6 megajoules to 17. And they would fly almost five times farther — up to 300 nautical miles. That’s enough to put 100% of targets in North Korea “at Risk” from a single battleship, a Navy briefing notes (right, sorry for the crappy scan).
